Marmalade and other movements

I decided to make marmalade. It seemed only fitting as it was supposed to go inside a cupcake. I was not about to make the cupcakes, that would involve using measuring cups, but I still felt I should do my part. I found a willing participant who would gladly make cupcakes. My girlfriend is a "stress baker." What this means is that her primary coping mechanism is to bake cookies or, in what has become her new nodus operandi, cupcakes. You can see all the delicious results of her stressful days on here. I really try not to stress her out just for the cookies, but sometimes, I must admit, I do give into temptation.
To assuage my guilt, I try to cook for her. Real food. Manly food. Not especially manly food, because I don't like to grill. My last grilling experience... The grill caught on fire. I was making hamburgers. Little balls of ground beef. Not gourmet, just simple hamburgers. Easy, delicious, what could go wrong? The grill could catch on fire. I know, it's a grill. The fire is how you cook things. That turned into a massive grease fire right under my burgers. Those burgers, they turned into something between a hockey puck and a racquetball.
So, since it does not involve being angered near a grill, I made marmalade. I scoured the Internet for nearly 7 minutes to find the perfect recipe. Most of the recipes read like this: 14 pounds of oranges, 37 pounds of sugar, a home commercial cannery, and a dromedary camel. Not having a camel, only a few oranges, and no desire for a post apocalyptic store of orange marmalade, I nearly gave up the whole project. Ultimately, I four a recipe that made only one, normal sized jar. I read it, took some ideas and then made my own recipe. So here is what I did.

1.5 oranges... I ate half of that second orange, but i probably shoud've used it. I did put the peel into the concoction. I actually used a blood orange and half a regular orange because I was going for a slightly different flavor.
1 lime. This is keeping with that "slighty different flavor."
1/4 C sugar. This is not particularly sweet. Add more sugar if you prefer.
1/4 C water.

Wash the oranges and lime, then slice them thin with the peel on. I then threw them into a food processor and hit pulse a few times to make them smaller. With mixed results.











Throw everything into an appropriately sized saucepan and let it boil. Your goal here is to boil the water, dissolve the sugar and start softening this oranges. Let that go about 10 minutes, then turn it down to simmer for the next half hour. Remove the pan from the heat and read a good book. After waiting until your marmalade has made progress on its way to cooling or you have made sufficient progress toward total consciousness, place your marmalade into 1 appropriately sized jar.
Unless you are planning on stockpiling marmalade in case the whole Y2K thing finally catches up to us, you don't need to do any ridiculous canning process. Just throw it in the fridge until you are ready to make cupcakes.